WASHINGTON, Dec 4: Moving beyond Al Qaeda for the first time since the Sept 11 terror attacks, the US administration has shut down a fund-raising foundation that it accused of helping the Palestinian group Hamas.

The organization banned is known as the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Rehabilitation and is based in Texas. It has denied any links to Hamas, but President Bush charged in an appearance before the press on Tuesday that it had collected $13 million last year that had been allegedly used to finance Hamas activities. The foundation’s affiliates in other US cities were also shut down.

The administration’s move comes immediately in the wake of the weekend suicide bombings in Al Quds and Haifa, and reflects the new hardening of attitudes in Washington towards the Palestinians. It also indicates an American readiness to expand the campaign against terrorism while still engaged in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The change in Washington’s mood was noticed on Monday when, departing from its past practice of urging restraint on Israel, it refused to condemn the Israeli strikes against Palestinian targets and Yasser Arafat’s headquarters, or Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s virtual declaration of war against Palestinians.

In previous similar situations, the US had criticized both Palestinians acts and retaliatory moves by Israel, urging caution on both sides. In some instances, it had even characterized Israeli retaliation, usually carried out with the help of US-supplied weapons, as being out of proportion to Palestinian actions. This is no longer the case. Israel did not ask Washington for a green light for its retaliatory strikes against Palestinians and no green light was given, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said on Monday, hours after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had met President Bush before cutting short his visit to Washington and flying home.

The change of tone appears particularly marked when compared to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech last month in which he had for the first time clearly expressed the Bush administration’s opposition to Israeli occupation of Arab territories. That was seen at least as a strong rhetorical concession to the Palestinian position. But, according to those closely watching the policy-making process in Washington, the latest suicide attacks, which killed 25 Israeli citizens, caught the administration in the midst of an atmosphere where there is a low level of tolerance for what are seen as terrorist activities. Even more significant appears to be a shift in the attitude towards President Yasser Arafat, who for the time being appears to have lost his value in American eyes as a reliable partner in the quest for Middle East peace. What this portends for the Palestinian movement, with its obvious implication of driving Mr Arafat into a corner where he may be left with no choice except to involve his own people in civil strife, appears to be of no immediate concern to policy-makers here.

An expert on the Middle East, Mark Strauss, who is senior editor of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s journal, Foreign Policy, says successive US administrations had basically counted on Mr Arafat to keep the peace process going. The question now is not whether Mr Arafat wants to or is capable of controlling the violence in Gaza, the West Bank and within Israel itself, but the sense is that he can no longer be considered an interlocutor for peace, Mr Strauss told Dawn on Tuesday.

The United States, Mr Strauss said, was caught between Israel’s need for self-defence and the need to bring Middle East violence to an end. After last month’s Powell speech, “there is a sense of betrayal and of tremendous frustration in Washington, that it has been let down by the suicide attacks”.

But the Middle East has a history of going through swings from one extreme to another, and the course of events in the next few days can again lead to a shift in sympathies. Some observers believe that President Bush’s refusal since he took over to meet Mr Arafat personally, interpreted by Palestinians as a calculated slight, could have not only undercut Mr Arafat’s position in his own constituency but also encouraged militancy.